We’re up to our noses in bullshit. You can’t shovel out, only rise above.
Last week I saw a retweet pass by with an amazing claim:
Reading up on Great Depression tax policies and here's where my eyes bugged out pic.twitter.com/yi9zYAogZJ
— Matthew Glidden (@matthewglidden) January 15, 2017
I didn’t pay it much attention, after looking at who’d shared the original post, and kept scrolling. The next day, another person retweeted it, which annoyed me to the point of digging into it. My American history education came from poorly-funded public schools, but a failed plot to stage a fascist coup against the longest-serving President of the U.S. probably would have come up somewhere in there.
The obvious thing to search for was Smedley Butler, leading to his Wikipedia page, which discusses this very event in the third paragraph of the summary: the Business Plot. You barely have to skim to figure out that the highlighted paragraph that Matthew Glidden posted is baseless, and do a bit of searching (the wiki pages, oddly, aren’t linked) to find information on the American Liberty League, the (boring, dead-by-1936) group funded by du Pont et. al.
It takes a little more effort to read one of the primary sources listed on the page, Same quote-search technique helps find what Glidden was reading; it credits a Steve Kangas, who, more searching reveals, was a notable Usenet crank. Kangas’s site still lives, and you can see for yourself how he couldn’t put the people he names anywhere close to Butler or MacGuire. [I was hoping for a Pepe Silvia moment.] Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt series, by taking the quote and running it through Google Books. The full passage dismisses it as something that existed almost entirely in a bond salesman’s head, and it seems no one either at the time or after has found compelling evidence to the contrary.
From reading the tweet to reading through the primary source took me five, maybe seven minutes. Not wanting to cause a dustup, I obliquely dropped my research where the first person who shared it could see it. It took another fifteen, maybe twenty to dig through the sources Glidden was reading while writing this up. It took a minute for him to post it and a second each for 4,500 people to share it.
That is why we’re so thoroughly screwed.
The day after, a friend posted a link to an post on digital literacy that points out critical thinking is nothing without domain knowledge. There’s an entire argument, to be had another time, about deferral to expertise (‘epistemic learned helplessness’, if you read too much Hacker News) (It’s a bit long, with many detailed examples, but you should read it through.) It casted what I’d done above, in a fit of pique, in a different light. It took a lot of implicit knowledge, surely more than what I’m rolling off here:
The last point is important. This example comes from the left, but it would be trivial to find an example of this from any point of view. We all wear ideological blinkers; I certainly have them. 90% of media literacy is knowing the tendencies of the publication you’re reading, and the other 90% is simple personal humility. But the internet in general and social media in particular have given five billion shitposters the free ability to self-segregate then reflexively and uncritically share: the blinkers are now pinholes. In some cases, the connection of viral sharing to ad revenue incentivized making not just tendentious claims but whole-cloth bullshit plastered with ads—what ‘fake news’ orignally referred to, before rapidly being diluted to meaninglessness.
I can’t make myself get worked up about only fake news, though. Whole-cloth bullshit, as well as hoaxes, gossip, and everyday claptrap are old as time and, I would argue, completely normal. They’re familiar to anyone who’s been too polite (or perhaps too entertained) to get up from their bar stool while being regaled with tall tales, fish stories, ugly rumors, or neatly cocktail-napkin-sized conspiratorial explanations of the world. And everyone’s repeated them. There are calls to attack fake news from the ad tech side to disincentivize it, but humans are humans and rumor easily spreads with or without ads. What’s new is frictionless sharing, and the orders of magnitude between the seconds to share and the minutes to refute (if the refutation will be had). What’s new our base impulses being put to work against us for what is largely, for now, Facebook’s bottom line. (They reduce you to “eyeballs,” you know. That’s their metonym.)
I don’t hold hopes of Facebook turning this around, even if they want to. When a certain strain of bullshit becomes too noisome for one platform to bear, people will take it to another. That doesn’t get rid of the problem, but it does make it less visible; Coincidentally, this is also how Silicon Valley approaches homelessness good for the platform, bad for humanity.
I also don’t hold hopes of people turning themselves around, either, but individuals can choose to do better. You can opt out. Stop. Not share. Especially if you don’t know the person well, don’t know their political goals and it’s something that hits you hard, angers you, sounds too good/awful to be true. Don’t like that post either, liking (or reacting) posts it to your friends’ feeds now too. Oh and commenting. Don’t comment on that news story. That also goes to your friends’ timelines. They made shares, likes, and comments do the same thing for a reason: “eyeballs.” While we’re at it, maybe don’t post that insta. Don’t reply to that author on twitter, christ, you’re filtered anyway. Or, better still, never tweet.
Honestly? For the sake of all of us, log off. Delete your account. ðŸŒ